Glorious Freedom
by StillAliveDoingScience
Summary: The facility is not how she remembers it. It's a nearly destroyed, decaying mess with—at first thought—nothing left alive inside. But maybe, somewhere hiding underneath the layers of test chambers and rubble, there's someone worth saving.


_Author's Note: _The turret I'm basing this off of is just a regular turret, but I got part of the idea from an animation by Zachariah Scott on Youtube. If you haven't checked out his Portal SFM vids yet, you should! They're pretty great :D

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**Glorious Freedom**

The sky above was a cold, whitewashed grey. Thick clouds fully obscured any hint of true sunlight, and misty rain fell from the uniform cover in sheets, extending patches of light and dark greys far into the horizon in gradually-approaching patterns. The tiny droplets of vapor and rain drifted down toward a damp and twisted crop of wild wheat, its golden hue reduced to thick browns and yellows by the absence of the afternoon sun. Little trickling rivets formed between the stalks, tracing muddy, pre-formed paths downslope, around a circular, cracked pad of concrete on which an ancient tin shed stood, surrounded by rusted beams and small piles of rubble.

The air was cool and damp. Though there were none around to sense it, the unmistakeable smells of rotting roots and muddy soil and ozone were thick, hinting of a coming storm. Right on cue, a flash of the brightest light flickered through the charged air from far away, briefly illuminating the shadowy sides of the out-of-place shed before a following clap of thunder echoed loudly across the field.

Not a soul heard it. Nothing moved, aside from the whisper of gathering wind through the moist and sticky stalks, and the ever-trickling course of the shallow stream trailing downslope, finally coming to ride the lip of a yawning pit filled with an unnerving expanse of looming darkness, and—in its very depths—a strange sort of luminescence glowed. It was an odd place, a torn place, the scattered, random openings being holes of plunging darkness like death traps in an otherwise innocent expanse of wheat. The absence of animals was yet even more sinister—it was as if everything except the wheat itself, being rooted into the ground forevermore, had abandoned it. What kind of a place should even animals avoid was a mystery to any that may have ever stumbled upon it—a mystery that would never be solved, for anyone who came there was never to be seen again.

It was a mystery to all except for one person, one survivor, if you will, a lone test subject locked away in a labyrinth prison of never-ending hallways and ever-shifting chambers—the streams above cascaded down into this pit, this _facility, _feeding the feeble amount of plant life and vegetation that had managed to grow there over the years of abandonment.

Chell flitted like a ghost among panels, her fading orange pants camouflaged against a background of reddish rusts and brown stains smeared along what may have once been white walls. It was a chaos of disrepair, angles of order and perfection fallen out and strewn across a floor covered in moss, while the Laboratories' overseer slept, blind to the destruction.

The woman's breath was short but deep. She breathed in the thick air, the smell of peat and decaying metals, the humidity sticking to her skin in the way small fungi clung to the walls. A barely-functional portal device was clutched in her right hand, emitting a quiet hum hardly distinguishable from the deep heartbeat of the facility—a groaning, clanking echo of falling, dislocated beams and the faint tinkling of water—and she sloshed through a pool of sludge, balanced perfectly on heelspring and tiptoe.

Up a ramp, along a catwalk—she came to a small office filled with yellowed photocopiers and ruined filling cabinets, not pausing to explore. Chell was on a mission, albeit a nearly hopeless one. She was going to escape from this place, this pit of utter hellishness where nothing existed except for uncaring and cold machines with souls, dead-set on keeping her here forever, or worse—_killing her. _

She hadn't ever meant to submit to _her _rules and guidelines. And now, it was over, and Chell had won, destroyed _her,_ vanquished _her—_except, even when the monstrous AI was unconscious, rendered completely incapable of stopping her from leaving, the facility itself appeared to have some ill-feelings toward escaping test subjects.

A lot—_a lot—_had been damaged while she'd been asleep. Every pane of glass was shattered, every test chamber dilapidated, corridors were shabby and dead. It was a different world, different even from that which she had fallen asleep in, evidently many years ago—and it was hard to tell which one was more dangerous. A world ruled by an omnipotent, all-seeing queen, or _this—_where a floor was no guarantee of stability, where her path was unclear and unmarked, and where her only companion was a personality core who clearly had no inkling of just how dangerous traveling through the derelict facility could be.

Chell ducked beneath a dangling crossbeam, and approached a dirt-smeared and sparking circular door—it was a miracle the motion sensor still worked, she thought, as it shuddered open with a hair-raising _scrape, _as if sand had caught in its track.

She stumbled through, into the next corridor, and then the next, not wondering for a moment where she was going. She was lost, and she knew it. It had been hours since she had last seen her blue-eyed companion, and the only reminder that she was not utterly alone was the faint call of a bird, ringing dismally from some distant area. She wiped her sticky, faintly-glimmering forehead with the back of a dirt-smudged hand, her crystal eyes flickering from darkened corner to darkened corner under her grimy mop of hair. Chell raised the portal device—she fired once, twice—and flitted out in yet another unrecognizable area, wincing a little as the _fffop _of connecting portals triggered some sort of tremor and clouds of dust rained down all around her. She tasted dirt, her eyes watered, and a deep groany thrumming sounded from inside every single wall, almost as if the facility was ceaselessly protesting her attempt at escape.

It was lighter here. Above, through a sheet of hanging vines and dripping water, she could make out what might have been surface light—if indeed the facility had been so damaged that great chunks of the roof had been ripped out. She shook her head, tried once more in vain to wipe the soot out of her eyes, and marched on.

Around a corner—through a set of doors, down a grilled set of steps, and the heels of her boots made a cold sound against each one that made her shiver. She heard the bird again, closer this time—but there was still no sign of her long-lost companion.

Chell began to wonder if she'd ever see the sphere again before she accidentally fell to her death, starved, or maimed herself accidentally in some other way. She frowned, unwilling to give into hopelessness, and that was when she saw it—she sensed movement in a distant room to her right. The opening was very narrow and quite a ways away, and she wouldn't have noticed the passage at all if the shrouded interior hadn't contrasted so well with her current path. Inside, she caught a glimpse of bright colors, perhaps even the corner of a mural—and immediately, she recognized what the room must be.

She checked her path and sloshed through a lake of scummy, stinking sludge about knee-deep, and along a series of pipes and pistons extending from the backs of out-of-service panels, all the while trying to ignore the sickly scent of machine oil and rotting moss. The thick humidity and gloom pursued her here, too, even though she had travelled into the higher reaches of the expansive factory. She wrinkled her nose and ploughed on, her gun at the ready, elbows bent and her spine straight. Nothing could be heard except for the water through which she moved and the continuous distant trickling.

But then, she saw it again—the movement—coming from somewhere dead ahead. She couldn't quite make out what it was, but there was a flash of color and then a new sound, distinctly mechanical, and vaguely familiar. She had a nagging feeling that she _should_ have known what it meant, that she _knew _it, and had encountered it often before—and also that it meant nothing good.

She swallowed hard, her fist locking up inside of the portal device. She slunk lower, almost crouching as she inched forward, her breath even and slow in concentration and her eyes peeled for any sign of movement. Slowly, the room crept into view—but she paid no mind to the colorful paintings on panels that had caught her eye from the adjacent hallway.

"_I see you."_

Chell leapt backward immediately, her heart hammering as a blood-red beam of light found its way onto her, hitting her dead-center in the chest. She stumbled and nearly fell, the portal device flying around wildly as she tried to unhook one of the curled heels of her boots from around an unseen hunk of debris, lurking invisible beneath the pungent water. If she had remembered how to scream, she would have, for she knew the second she had faltered that it was too late, that it was over, and the facility had finally won the battle against her and was about to take her life—

But it didn't.

Chell opened her eyes, not realizing she had closed them. The turret was there, upon a platform overlooking the room, its steady red laser circling once before coming to rest just below her chin again. She flinched, stumbling backward until her spine hit the surface of a moldering, damp panel, and she pressed herself into it, her breath coming in shallow gasps.

But the turret didn't fire.

"You're the lady from the test."

Chell hardly heard the light, modulated voice's statement—she was still reeling in surprise. How could she have been so stupid to think that there would not have been turrets still lying around? Of course there would be—maybe that sphere was right, and maybe her brain was damaged—

"Aren't you?"

Catching her breath, Chell looked back up, gazing at the turret in mistrust and disbelief. It hadn't shot her yet—and surely that meant it wasn't going to shoot her?—but never, not once in her time at Aperture, had Chell ever come face-to-face with a turret that did not intend to kill her. Such a thing just did not happen.

"You can just nod, you know."

Its eyelight flickered once, and—unless she was hallucinating—a minuscule shield below its flaming optic rose briefly in a simulated smile. Chell raised a trembling, moist hand to rub at her sweating forehead, and then, knowing fully well it was impractical and illogical to do so, and that this entire situation could very well be a side-effect of the infamous brain damage, she nodded.

"I am pleased to meet you."

The turret's modulated tones died away to almost absolute silence, broken only by the distant sounds of the facility and _drip drip _from nearby. Chell tried to pry herself off of the panel her back was plastered against, wanting to run back down the corridor she had come from and risk turning her back on a live turret in favor of being anywhere—_anywhere—_that meant that she didn't have to listen to more of the facility's _voices._

At least the personality core, with his blustery, never-ceasing accent was such a non-modulated change from _her—_in comparison, _he _hardly sounded like a part of the facility at all. She'd never let herself forget that he _was, _that the sphere was just another creation made by Aperture, another failed and corrupted personality core, probably—but _turrets,_ no, there was absolutely no chance of her ever forgetting what they were and who they were commanded to kill.

Her.

But Chell could not move. She could not force herself to look away from the staring turret, not yet, and _why—_she didn't know why, and that was frightening. Perhaps it was even more frightening than the world she had awoken in—a facility half-dead, dying with her still inside.

"You look afraid."

She nodded again, her lip trembling in nervousness, and she let her eyes drift quickly over the surrounding panels, plotting an escape route. Their painted surfaces were watermarked and grimy even in the semi-bright lighting filtering down through an empty square space overhead. Her knuckles tensed, gritty brown fading into white inside of the portal gun as she considered the portalable surfaces—there was one directly behind the turret, she could make a break for it, if she needed to—

"You don't have to be. _She's _not around anymore."

Chell's breath caught in her throat at the pronoun and her entire arm shook in disbelief, matching her racing heart. A sharp surge of adrenaline fired along every synapse, every nerve, and it must have shown on her face, for a moment later, the turret spoke again.

"I never liked her. We're all on our own, now, and you don't have to be afraid. I don't hate you."

A prickling feeling was sweeping up Chell's back as the hairs on her neck stood on end. She shivered, though she was not cold, on the contrary it was very humid and warm—but the familiar phrase '_I don't hate you' _was enough in itself to warrant a tremor. It was the same thing she'd heard other turrets say as she knocked them offline during what felt like an eternity ago, through the testing, though this time, this one's voice was different—the change was barely decipherable, so faint and subtle that a part of her thought that maybe it was just a figment of her imagination. The turret sounded—maybe she _was _brain damaged for thinking it—this turret, it sounded, well… more _alive _than the others had been.

She took a hesitant step forward through the murky water, ignoring the wet sloshing sounds that accompanied her faltering step. Again, she noticed the turret's eye shield pull up into that smile, and she frowned, her crystal eyes full of a startling curiosity. She knew well that she shouldn't let it get the better of her, that she should try to turn back while she still could, and find her _other _companion before it was too late, but…

"Please don't leave me."

Chell blinked, and the turret—it blinked, too. She hadn't even known the little guns were _capable _of blinking.

"I don't like it here. It's too quiet. It's lonely."

Lonely, yes—even though she had been plagued by danger ever since the blue-eyed sphere had awoken her from cryosleep, she had been subtly conscious of just how _lonely _the facility felt when she was on her own, sifting through the dilapidated ruin for a traversable path. It contrasted so well with the usual heartbeat that _she _kept up—the drumming, thrumming vibrations of never-ceasing production, of machinery and mechanical arms bending, pulling, craning to rearrange themselves on her merest whim. There were no more whistling vibrations of pneumatic tubes circling this-way-and-that in an interconnected, dizzying and spiralling mess of mass-production. There was near-silence, lack of movement, stillness where there should have been motion, chaos where there should have been order, and even though the closest semblance of life the facility could imitate was nothing but cold steel and electric current running through circuitry, that artificial liveliness somehow felt more _active, _more _real, _and less _remote _than this near all-encompassing silence did.

This—_this_ was the sound of water, the scent of growing ferns, of decay, of derelict and rust. It was the sound of her boots being the only true motion for miles as she picked her careful path, it was the knowledge that there was nobody else, _nobody else around, _even counting machines—and that she was all alone, save, perhaps, for this lonely turret.

And the notion was incomprehensibly breathtaking.

_Tap tap, tap tap._

Chell looked up at the strange, metallic sound. It was caused by the turret—but the quiet ringing wasn't produced by it readying its barrels or deploying its bullets or doing anything else of regular turret fashion—instead, shockingly enough, it had bent one of its longish, spindly legs forward, and was tapping at the catwalk it sat upon, much like one kicking at a stone with one's foot.

Could a turret even _move _like that? She would have thought—she _did _think—that it was not possible. Chell blinked again, wondering for the umpteenth time whether she was seeing things or not, her unasked question shining from her cold, shrewd eyes.

_?_

The turret flinched, and its optic drew nearly closed as it shied away from her, unmistakeably bashful.

"Will you be my friend?" it asked.

Chell stared, even more dumbstruck than usual. Truthfully, she was not having the most predictable day—something about being awoken an unprecedented amount of years into the future by a blue-glowing eyeball who wouldn't shut up may have been a little unnerving in itself, but this—_this _was even more bizarre.

It was as if, today, the hidden underbelly of the facility—the side that was forbidden and unlawful, destined to rule only while _she _was away—had awoken from its deep slumber. It was the crosstalk between panels, the coughing start of her relaxation room's Aperture Science Relaxation Chamber Motorized Emergency Load Relocator, the whisper of an Emancipation Grill, not to mention the three voices of the day—the unnamed announcer, the personality core, and this… _turret. _Something, a catastrophic event—caused by _someone—_herself—had revived these constructs, these underdogs, and had brought them all together. So, in reality, why _shouldn't _she be his (she had decided that this turret was, in fact, male) friend? If he could help her, if he was on her side, all for keeping the terrifyingly omnipotent AI offline—then _why not?_

Her usual deadpan expression flickered for the briefest moment. It was as if the sun, hidden far, far above the thick cloud cover as the storm raged with fury outside, had suddenly broken through and cast a single, glowing beam down upon the woman's face, but as quickly as it had come, it vanished. She shut back down, though with a barely-perceivable lift, the tiniest decrease of wrinkles between her eyebrows—and it was enough for her turret friend to understand.

He smiled again. "Thank you," he hummed happily, the three legs all shifting into a more relaxed position. "I've never had a friend before. What's your name?"

The question hung heavily in the air, and Chell felt something well up inside of her throat before she pushed it back down, immediately. It was like a cork stuck in a bottle, a pressure overwhelmed with the complete inability to _speak. _She tired, tried to voice the fact that she didn't honestly _know _her name, as bad as it was, and tried to say that she had no idea—but it hurt almost as much as it hurt for her to realize that she didn't know who she even _was _outside of a 'Test Subject'_._

All she managed was a pitiful little rasp, a wheezy sort of sound of barely-vibrating vocal chords. It was her breath, not her voice, that made the sound, and in reflex she brought her hand up to her throat, hating herself for being broken, hating herself for _forgetting _how to speak, for forgetting who she was.

"It's all right," he replied with empathy, and Chell looked into his eye, taken aback. Had he understood what her actions meant? Perhaps turrets were smarter than she gave them credit for—after all, this one could walk along on its own, and never had she imagined that that was possible. "I don't know my real name, either," he said in a whisper, "All I have is my serial number. 80881. It spells 'BOBBI', in the letters that look like the numbers."

Bobby. Chell allowed another small smile, quick as a flash, to light her shadowy face. Bobby. It was a good name, she thought, if she had been asked her opinion of it—it suited him, she was almost sure, though Chell did not know much about names, as it were.

Bobby looked curiously down at her gun, and the way its hollow end completely swallowed her entire right fist. Chell shifted uncomfortably under his gaze, making to edge it out of sight, behind her back. "Were you going somewhere?" he asked her, blinking slowly and observing her carefully.

She nodded cautiously, and brought the gun back out, automatically firing an orange portal at a nearby stretch of undisturbed panel, her bored, vaguely displeased expression back in full force.

"You can tell me."

Her slow, rhythmic breath rocked her body back and forth slowly as she considered. All was silent, aside from the continual _drip _originating from somewhere behind the surrounding panels—there was no sign of the blue-eyed sphere, no whisper of a management rail, not a breath of his accented voice on the air. Had he left her to die? He had told her, she'd heard it, that he'd meet her up ahead, and he had wished her good luck—but what was keeping him from completely abandoning her? She needed out, to escape—a _need, _ever more than a desire, and it was this that had brought them together—but did he really_ need _out, as well? What would a personality construct, with no arms or legs, be able to do on the surface?

No, by this point, she felt sure that the sphere was long-gone, and that she was alone. Alone—except, perhaps, for her newfound friend, Bobby.

Chell raised her free hand jerkily, and jabbed her thumb unceremoniously at the ceiling. _Escape. I'm going out, _she thought glumly.

"Oh."

She watched Bobby shy away again, his optic narrowing in uncertainty. The red beam fell away from her, coming to rest a few feet away along a sketched and penmarked panel—the end of the laser stopped abruptly, perfectly center of a black, sprawling depiction of _her _body.

"I have never seen the surface before."

He trailed into silence again, and Chell watched him closely. The little turret—for she realized now, he could hardly be the size of most turrets she'd seen in testing—let his laser drift up, and up, toward the luminescent square in the center of the ceiling. She thought long and hard, while he thought. She thought about how hard the task she had set herself was going to be, about how far from the surface she currently was, about how it would be a miracle if the actually managed to make it out alive…. and finally, after a silence so long that Bobby had turned away, as though he assumed that something he had done or said had offended her, Chell made a directive motion with her free hand.

_Do you want to come?_

Bobby's optic widened in shock. "Go… go with you? To- to the _surface?_"

Her reply was a solitary, serious nod, accompanied by a challenging arch of an eyebrow.

"I…"

She took a few hesitant steps forward. _It's now or never, I can't wait here any longer. It's too dangerous._

"…Okay." Looking as though he had just sealed his fate to a death that would surely occur within the hour, as if the very notion of sunlight was a poisonous thing that was sure to burn him alive, he agreed with a turret-ish, brave nod. "I'll come with you. Maybe it won't be so bad, out there..."

Chell's lips split into a devilish grin and she lunged forward, raising the gun in triumph. She'd have a new companion, a _better _escape partner, one who could defend her with bullets and who was very inconspicuous in _her _eye—and, best of all, who she could consider, on some level, her _friend. _

"Ahhh, wait…!" Bobby cried out in surprise as Chell swung the barrel of the portal device toward him, and the turret's optic widened in alarm as he staggered backward, away from the gun. "I'mscared—what are you d—AAAAHH!"

Bobby called out in fear as Chell pulled the trigger and instantly the little turret was swept up into the energy manipulator. The shout faded into a rolling, mechanical giggle as his oval body spun around in a single loop before coming to rest in a face-up position, pointing ahead of Chell. Her dry lips cracked into an actual, true smile, and she felt her own bubbly, happy giggle well up inside of her throat. The feeling revitalized her better than the gentle trickle of rainwater from the surface had, better than the blue-eyed personality core's wake up call, even, better than anything—because _they were going to escape. _Here. Now. _Together_.

Bobby opened his side panels cheekily, peering ahead with his laser into the gloom as Chell climbed up a steep, broken catwalk, trying to be extra careful to not scrape her hand on the sharp surface, nor drop the device and Bobby. "Glorious freedom," the turret whispered to her as he searched ahead, lighting her way, "Here we go, friend! Freedom! To the surface for us!"

If only Bobby had been facing the other way around. Then, he might have seen the way the woman's face lit up in a true, radiant smile. A brief, unexpected thought flitted across her mind as the happy bubble inside of her chest swelled—after everything she had gone through in living memory, after all of the hurt and the pain the master of the facility had caused her, after all the ruthless rounds of tests she had thrown at her and the torturously short-lived escape attempts—maybe, just _maybe,_ Chell had finally found a part of Aperture _worth _taking with her to the surface. A friend worth saving.

Like the subtle rays of a cloud-covered sun shining however dimly from above, which, as dim as the rays might have been, still managed to light the darkest twists and turns of her path; maybe Chell had found the lighter part within the heart of a darkened, decaying shadow of a once-mighty science facility.

That lightness was all she needed to survive in Aperture Science.

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_Author's Note: _Ooops, I made myself want to see Chell go through Portal 2 with a turret friend instead of a Wheatley O_O Well. Tell me how you liked this little random oneshot that I dedicated the larger part of my evening to tonight :D


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